Actual article date: Sep 9, 2013

CIBTM is the largest exhibition for the Chinese MICE industry held over 3 days. It is hosted at the China National Convention Centre, a sprawling infrastructure situated right beside the iconic Bird Nest stadium and the Olympic Aquatic Centre. This year, it sees the highest attendance ever.

There were many countries based booths with the likes of Australia, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Japan, South Korea etc. The DMCs were also well represented at the event as well as hoteliers.

We actually managed to catch the project manager for CIBTM, Jeffery, who commented that the exhibition is comparatively smaller to the likes of EIBTM. I rather see it as that the organising team has brought about a highly relevant group of buyers and sellers for the event! Kudos to that.

What was interesting was the setup of the event. Each booth was build mainly for speed networking with the many isolated meeting areas, as we have wrote about previously. This was very much in line with the hosted buyers programme by the organisers where these privileged buyers get access to a exclusive networking for speed meetings to be made. Each exhibitor as well as buyer was then given a list of scheduled meetings for the event. (On a side note, this is totally what we specialises in over here at Jublia!)

We attended the event as trade visitors and managed to meet with a few of the exhibitors when they are not engaged in a meeting with buyers. One of the only negative comment that we get from the few exhibitors is their frustration over the scheduled meetings as some of them are repeated entries, no-shows ( big headache for exhibitors) as well as they don’t really know who they are meeting. Furthermore, they didn’t find the matching process intuitive enough. Side tracking a little, it’s quite encouraging to hear from the exhibitors that we should have used our Jublia Match© platform for CIBTM after short demos.

Otherwise, I think its safe to say that most people were really satisfied with the event as well as the various informative seminars held in conjunction with CIBTM. One of my favourite seminar was the data presented for the Asian MICE market where certain interesting facts were made known after a in-depth study by the market analyst company and thoughtfully presented by the director of that company, Sally. We also managed to catch her for a short chat after her session and she gave us great comments on our product. Thank you Sally!

Overall, it was a really great event and South Korea closed Day 2 with a nice K-pop routine!